In this course we will read a series of texts from the French-speaking world that deal with questions of travel, migration, and of what is means to be at home, to go away, and to leave home behind. We will use these literary texts to help us enter into discussions about national origin, immigration status, race, social class, gender, economic status, and religion, among other factors that can be used to discuss identity. Through texts from Africa, North America, the Caribbean, and Europe, we will study questions about power in the world around us, while also investigating our own personal experiences, origins, and life stories. We will read novels, poetry, plays, and essays. We will also watch a few films. As this course is a first-year writing seminar, we practice writing about the topics that arise from our readings and discussions, and we will actively engage in revising our writing on a regular basis as we explore what it means to leave home and become at home in a new place.

Terms offered: 2024 Fall Semester

Friendship is a precious relationship often wrongly regarded as less vital, intense, or transformative than love. It encompasses a wide range of social bonds, from playground companionship and wartime camaraderie to Facebook links. Most friendships have a lasting impact in people’s lives and trajectories. Some are toxic and so passionate that they can become dangerous. Others are fragile, sometimes fake, or easily endangered by selfish motives. Through novels and movies this seminar investigates the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of the liberating and alienating dynamics of friendship within an array of relationships: political, inter-gender, inter-racial, inter-religious and inter-generational friendships, as well as the mentor-disciple dynamic.

Terms offered: 2022 Fall Semester

A study of the basic forms, structures, and vocabulary in the context of the French-speaking world. Emphasis on the four communicative skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Three class hours per week and one weekly conversation session with teaching assistants, plus regular language laboratory assignments. Primarily open to first- and second-year students.

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester; 2022 Fall Semester; 2023 Fall Semester; 2024 Fall Semester; 2025 Fall Semester

A study of the basic forms, structures and vocabulary in the context of the French-speaking world. Emphasis on the four communicative skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. A study of the basic forms, structures, and vocabulary in the context of the French-speaking world. Three class hours per week and one weekly conversation session with assistant.

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester; 2023 Spring Semester; 2024 Spring Semester; 2025 Spring Semester

Vocabulary development and review of basic grammar, which are integrated into more complex patterns of written and spoken French. Active use of French in class discussions and conversation sessions with French teaching fellows.Three class hours per week and one weekly conversation session.

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester; 2022 Fall Semester; 2023 Fall Semester; 2024 Fall Semester; 2025 Fall Semester

Continued development of oral and written skills; course focus shifts from grammar to reading. Short readings form the basis for the expansion of vocabulary and analytical skills. Active use of French in class discussions and conversation sessions with French teaching fellows. Three class hours per week and one weekly conversation session.

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester; 2023 Spring Semester; 2024 Spring Semester; 2025 Spring Semester

An introduction to film analysis. Conversation and composition based on a variety of contemporary films from French-speaking regions. Grammar review and frequent short papers. Emphasis on student participation including a variety of oral activities. Three hours per week plus regular viewing sessions for films and a weekly conversation session with French teaching fellows.

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester; 2022 Fall Semester; 2023 Fall Semester; 2024 Fall Semester; 2025 Fall Semester

An introduction to the cultures of various French-speaking regions outside of France. Examines the history, politics, customs, cinema, and the arts of the Francophone world, principally Africa and the Caribbean. Increases cultural understanding prior to study abroad in French-speaking regions. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Latin American Studies. (Same as: AFRS 2407, LACL 2407)

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester; 2023 Spring Semester; 2025 Spring Semester

An introduction to contemporary France through newspapers, magazines, television, music, and film. Emphasis is on enhancing communicative proficiency in French and increasing cultural understanding prior to study abroad in France.

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester; 2023 Spring Semester; 2024 Spring Semester; 2025 Spring Semester

Examines oral and written traditions of areas where French is spoken in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America from the Middle Ages to 1848. Through interdisciplinary units, students examine key moments in the history of the francophone world, drawing on folktales, epics, poetry, plays, short stories, essays, and novels. Explores questions of identity, race, colonization, and language in historical and ideological context. Taught in French. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Latin American Studies. (Same as: AFRS 2409, LACL 2209)

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester; 2022 Spring Semester; 2022 Fall Semester; 2023 Spring Semester; 2023 Fall Semester; 2024 Spring Semester; 2024 Fall Semester; 2025 Spring Semester; 2025 Fall Semester

Examines questions of power and resistance as addressed in the literary production of the French-speaking world from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Examines how language and literature serve as tools for both oppression and liberation during periods of turmoil: political and social revolutions, colonization and decolonization, the first and second world wars. Authors may include Hugo, Sand, Sartre, Fanon, Senghor, Yacine, Beauvoir, Condé, Césaire, Djebar, Camus, Modiano, Perec, and Piketty. Students gain familiarity with a range of genres and artistic movements and explore the myriad ways that literature and language reinforce boundaries and register dissent. Taught in French. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Latin American Studies. (Same as: AFRS 2412, LACL 2210)

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester; 2022 Spring Semester; 2022 Fall Semester; 2023 Spring Semester; 2023 Fall Semester; 2024 Spring Semester; 2024 Fall Semester; 2025 Spring Semester; 2025 Fall Semester

Focuses on literary texts written by women from French-speaking West African, Central African, and Caribbean countries in the 20th and 21st centuries. Themes treated—women and/in colonization and enslavement, madness, memory, alienation, womanhood, individual and collective identity, war, democracy, gender dynamics, women and tradition, women and modernism, social, cultural, racial and ethnic hierarchies—are approached from a critical discourse analysis and comparative prism contextualized by historical, cultural, political, sociological, and gender frameworks. Works studied may be by Mariama Bâ, Aminata Sow Fall, Ken Bugul, Fatou Diome (Senegal), Tanella Boni (Côte d’Ivoire), Calixthe Beyala, Léonora Miano (Cameroun); Marie Chauvet, Évelyne Trouillot, Marie-Célie Agnant (Haïti); Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Gisèle Pineau (Guadeloupe); Suzanne Lacascade, Françoise Éga, and Fabienne Kanor (Martinique). This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St; Latin American Studies. (Same as: AFRS 3201, GSWS 3323, LACL 3222)

Examines the fait divers, a news item recounting an event of a criminal, strange, or licentious nature, as a source for literary and cinematographic production. Traces the development of the popular press and its relationship to the rise of the short story. Explores how literary authors and filmmakers past and present find inspiration in the news and render “true stories” in their artistic work. Readings may include selections from Rosset, J-P. Camus, Le Clézio, Cendrars, Beauvoir, Duras, Genet, Modiano, Bon, newspapers, and tabloids.

Terms offered: 2022 Fall Semester; 2025 Fall Semester

Students read, analyze, and produce scenes from French plays. At the end of the semester, student groups produce, direct, and perform in one-act plays. Authors studied may include Molière, Marivaux, Beckett, Ionesco, Sartre, Camus, Genet, Sarraute, and Anouilh. Conducted in French.

Terms offered: 2023 Spring Semester

Analysis of texts and images from early modern literary, philosophical, medical, ecclesiastical, and artistic sources from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, as well as of modern film, Web, and textual media, allows students to explore the conflicting roles of early modern bodies through several themes: birth and death, medicine and hygiene, gender and sexuality, social class, race, monstrosity, Catholic and Protestant visions of the body, the royal body, the body politic. Thoughtful comparison and examination of the meanings of the body today encouraged throughout. Conducted in French.

Terms offered: 2023 Fall Semester

A study of memoir novels, epistolary novels (letters), and autobiography. What does writing have to do with love and desire? What is the role of others in the seemingly personal act of “self-expression”? What is the truth value of writing that circulates in the absence of its author? These and other related issues are explored in the works of the most popular writers of eighteenth-century France: Prévost, Graffigny, Laclos, and Rousseau. Conducted in French.

Terms offered: 2024 Spring Semester

The occult is, by definition, that which is hidden or unknown, yet popular and scholarly fascination with the shadowy and uncertain worlds of witches, monsters, demons, the devil, and the mysteries of nature and the cosmos has fueled attempts by various authorities, writers, and artists to represent and thus to know, control, or exploit the spectacular potential of the occult. Explores early modern and modern representations of occult figures, events, practitioners, and practices in France through historical, literary, and journalistic readings, art, film, television, and the Web. Emphasis is placed on the early modern period, but analysis of modern inheritances and interest in the occult parallel investigation of earlier periods throughout. Conducted in French.

Enslaved Africans who fought against oppression through escaping the European plantation system in the Caribbean for freedom in the mountains are called maroons, and their act, marronnage. Except for Queen Nanny of the Jamaican Blue Mountains, only male names have been consecrated as maroons and freedom fighters (the Haitians Makandal or Toussaint Louverture, the Martinican Louis Delgrès, the Jamaican Cudjoe or the Cuban Coba). The course examines the fictitious treatment French-speaking Caribbean authors grant to forgotten African or Afro-descended women who historically fought against enslavement and colonization. The literary works are studied against the backdrop of “Douboutism,” a conceptual framework derived from the common perception about women in the French Caribbean as expressed in the Creole say “fanm doubout,” which means “strong woman.” Authors studied may include Evelyne Trouillot, Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, André Schwarz-Bart, Suzanne Dracius, and Fabienne Kanor. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality and Women St; Latin American Studies. (Same as: AFRS 3211, GSWS 3211, LACL 3211)

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester

Since the eighteenth century, France has developed a seemingly endless list of literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt being the most famous. There are over 3,000 prizes awarded every year -- being awarded one of these prizes represents an official consecration meant to underline the writer’s unquestionable worth. Who serves on the juries for all of these prizes? Is it really the best works that are acknowledged? In recent years, scandals have erupted with accusations of influence peddling by publishers. What does this teach us about French culture and society? What is the relation between literary prizes and the promotion of French culture more broadly? In the context of globalization, what political statement is being made? What is exactly the type of culture, themes, and discourse promoted via this literature given the new makeup of the French population? Immigration has considerably changed the face of France. How does the culture of literary prizes take this into account? Students read four recent prizewinners. Each of these prizewinners created controversy that directly addresses the questions above. Primary readings include works by: Houellbecq, Le Clezio, Paule Constant, Alain Mabanckou.

Terms offered: 2024 Fall Semester

Aesthetics—the critical reflection on art, taste, and culture; as much as beauty, the set of properties of an object that arouses pleasure—are central to all aspects of society-building and human life and relationships. Examines the notions of aesthetics and beauty, from precolonial to contemporary times in cultures of the African, Caribbean, and Western civilizations as expressed in thought and various humanities and social sciences texts, as well as the arts, iconography, and the media. Considers the ways Africans and Afro-descendants in the American region responded to Western notions of aesthetics and beauty and posited their own. Authors studied may include Senghor, Cheick Anta Diop, Mudimbe, Gyekye Kwame, Anténor Firmin, Jean Price Mars, Damas, Suzanne Césaire, Aimé Césaire, René Ménil, Fanon, Glissant, Socrates, Plato, Diderot, Montesquieu, Baumgarten, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Ronsard, Erasmus, de Grenailles, and Hugo. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Latin American Studies. (Same as: AFRS 3213, LACL 3213)

Terms offered: 2024 Spring Semester

Examines French and Francophone crime fiction (novels, short stories, graphic novels, films) whose events question the past, not only of the victim, investigator, or suspect, but also of the society in which the crime has taken place. Explores texts and films in French that actively engage with the history of war, occupation, colonization, and decolonization, and examines their potential to foster social transformation and political revolution. Writers and filmmakers may include Yasmina Khadra, Driss Chraïbi, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Patrick Modiano, Didier Daeninckx, Michel Del Castillo, Tonino Benacquista, and Costa Gavras. Conducted in French.

Terms offered: 2025 Fall Semester

From storyboarding and script-writing to the exploration of French and Francophone cinematographic genres, introduces students to much of what goes into making a twelve-minute short movie. Teaches how to create characters, write dialogues, and act for the camera in French. Also introduces students to filmmaking techniques, from camera work to editing. Students improve their oral and writing skills as well as their knowledge of French and Francophone film while working toward the goal of producing collaboratively a short film. Conducted in French. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Cinema Studies. (Same as: CINE 3351)

Seminar. Provides insight into contemporary film production from the Maghreb (Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco). Explores questions of gender and sexuality, national identity, political conflict, and post- and neo-colonial relationships in the context of globalization and in conditions of political repression and rigid moral conservatism. Examines how filmmakers such as Lakhdar Hamina, Férid Boughedir, Moufida Tlatli, Nedir Moknèche, Malek Bensmaïl, Lyès Salem, Hicham Ayoub, and Leyla Bouzid work in a challenging socio-economic context of film production in consideration of setbacks and obstacles specific to the developing world. Taught in French. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Cinema Studies. (Same as: CINE 3352, MENA 3216)

Examines ideas about gender and sexuality and emerging conceptions of race and their relationship to science in early modern France and its North American and Caribbean colonies. Through reading and discussion of literary, testimonial, scientific, artistic, legal, and proto-ethnographic works produced by authors and artists from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, as well as critical work drawn from several disciplines, students explore how scientific ideas about human difference served to justify mechanisms of inequality, control, and violence that continue to have a devastating legacy today. Emphasis is also placed on analyzing responses and resistances to dominant structures and norms by Native Americans, Sub-Saharan Africans, French women, and gender-nonconforming men. Conducted in French.

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester

An introduction to some of the main intellectual productions from the French-speaking Caribbean from the nineteenth century to the present, such as the Haitian post-Revolution thought, Indigénisme and Spiralisme or Martinican Négritude, and Diversalité or Tout-monde. Examines theoretical and literary texts by Louis Joseph Janvier, Anténor Firmin, Jean Price-Mars, Frankétienne, René Depestre, Marie Chauvet, René Maran, Léon Gontran Damas, Bertène Juminer, Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, René Ménil, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Joseph Zobel, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Vincent Placoly, or Patrick Chamoiseau. Questions addressed include history, memory, ethics, humanism, freedom, relation, Caribbean epistemology, dignity, justice, existence, political theory, identity, race, and cultural autonomy. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies; Latin American Studies. (Same as: AFRS 3219, LACL 3259)

Terms offered: 2023 Spring Semester

Explores the ways in which authors refer to history, geography, and most particularly to other literary texts in order to form a community of voices that constitutes a body of expression unique to Francophone Canada. The literature of French Canada evokes a history of displacements, conflicts, triumphs, oppressions, and liberations that play out in relationship to “others” to whom texts respond. We will read essays, novels, plays, and poems from Francophone Canada and familiarize ourselves with events, texts, and places that will help us deepen our understanding and appreciation of the literary traditions of Canada, with an emphasis on Québécois and Acadian authors. Readings may include texts by Marie-Claire Blais, Roch Carrier, Herménégilde Chiasson, Evelyne de la Chenelière, Madeleine Gagnon, Claude Gauvreau, Anne Hébert, Dany Laferrière, Michèle Lalonde, Robert Lepage, Antonine Maillet, Gaston Miron, Wajdi Mouawad, Émile Nelligan, Gabrielle Roy, and Michel Tremblay.

Terms offered: 2021 Fall Semester; 2025 Spring Semester

Analyzes the depiction of the Algerian War of Independence in Algerian and French novels and films, drawing on trauma, postcolonial and decolonial theories. The Algerian War of Independence lasted nearly eight years (1954–62), cost between one million and one and a half million lives, saw atrocities like the use of torture by the French army and remained an obscure part of the national history of both Algeria and France. Algerian and French writers and filmmakers depict this war differently. Adopting a chronological and comparative approach to the representations of the conflict in Algeria and France, this seminar follows the various phases behind the construction of the collective memory of the Algerian War of Independence in each country. From state censorship, trauma, melancholic renderings of the past and nationalist appropriations of history, Algerian and French writers and filmmakers confront distinct problematics. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Middle Eastern & North African. (Same as: MENA 3223)

Terms offered: 2022 Spring Semester; 2025 Spring Semester

Establishes circumstances, conditions, and correspondences for French texts on the Jewish and Black experience of persecution, oppression, deportation, and servitude. Reexamines the history of ideas; French, Black, and Jewish discourses; and representations of Black and Jewish people by French writers. Uses a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. Writers may include Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, Abbé Grégoire, Abbé Prévost, Hugo, Lamartine, Loti, Proust, Apollinaire, Simenon, and Sartre. Conducted in French. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Africana Studies. (Same as: AFRS 3212)

Explores Mediterranean crime fiction or “noir” (novels, short stories, graphic novels, films) whose events describe and question the society in which the crime has taken place and that actively engage with the idea of otherness. The course examines how fiction fosters questions about a paradigm of thinking and solving crimes. Does a different provenance make a difference in how one approaches crime and evil? Writers and filmmakers may include: Jean-Claude Izzo, Costa Gavras, Driss Chraïbi, Camilleri, Massimo Carlotto, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Alicia Giménez Bartlett. Conducted in English, with students reading works in the original language or in translation as appropriate. Includes a fourth discussion hour in either French, Italian, or Spanish, with the respective professors to be scheduled following registration. This course originates in Romance Languages and Literatures and is crosslisted with: Francophone Studies; Hispanic Studies. (Same as: ITAL 3300, HISP 3300)